Content, as they say, is king. Today’s marketplace leans towards the visual, and at the far edge, the immersive experiences offered by virtual reality. But marketers often mistake this transition to be one in favour of style over substance – an error that can be fatal. Content, after all, is thought – rendered into text, visuals or video - and remains pre-eminent and the cornerstone of effective business communication. Experiences of corporations have repeatedly proven that no amount and razzle and dazzle can stand in for a genuinely engaging story or the power of clear and cohesive thought.
In today’s diverse and fragmented marketplace, sheer noise often drowns out individual voices. This poses a tremendous conceptual and creative challenge to communication consultants, and clearly thought out, cohesive and creatively rendered content is the only answer.

At Gauge, we believe that Enterprise Marketers who ignore this fundamental fact of corporate communication, does so at their own peril.
High quality content does not just ensure that the message is delivered effectively but also that it is delivered in a fashion that makes it relevant and appealing to individuals and groups of differing interests and tastes. People still love stories that appeal to them an emotional rather than utilitarian level – that hasn’t changed. And this is where quality content can make a crucial difference by lending clarity and cohesiveness to your message to ensure it is not 'lost in translation.'

Employee Engagement - A Four-Step Approach

Internal Communication impacts all 3 stages of an employee life cycle – Acquisition, Retention and Attrition. At Gauge, we tailor-make our solutions that create brand ambassadors across all three stages, giving them the individual attention they deserve based on the stage of the life cycle they are in. The Gauge approach to Employee Engagement is implemented using a time-tested process that follows four simple steps:

Measure

Discover the employee insights relating to brand knowledge, esteem, relevance and differentiation through primary/ secondary research or even FGDs and create the benchmark.

Evaluate

Design

Create the content that best delivers the solution. Make it clutter breaking and innovative for best impact. Our experts in Delhi and Bengaluru are adept in doing so.

Communicate

Whether it is through consistent media bombardment or ground activation or event engagement through digital means, we do not drop the project till it is complete.

Our Products

Employee Acquisition
and Orientation:

• Employee Value Proposition

• Recruitment Advertising

• Referral Campaigns

• Channel Partner Branding

• Campus Hire Communication

• New Hire Orientation

• Organization familiarity campaigns

• Business Conduct Guidelines communication

• Training Calendar and campaigns

• Special Events e.g. Family day etc.

Employee Retention,
Reducing Attrition and Increasing Yield:

• Vision, Mission and Values

• Reward and recognition drives

• Cultural campaigns to deliver engagements

• Career Pathing

• Promoting collaborations

• Participating in Organizational Values

• CSAT communication

• Motivational Communication

• Sales Enablement

• Great Place to Work Communication

Channel Promotion

Channel is another key area where effective Enterprise Marketing can make a big difference. Gauge’s ‘Five Commandments’ for effective Channel Promotion are:

Well crafted product pitches

Clear, cohesive business partner communication that seeks to highlight the advantages of the product to both Channel Partners and their clients, without brushing product weaknesses under the carpet.

Interactivity

An approach to Channel Promotion derived from the understanding that all communication between the enterprise, Channel Partners and customers are necessarily two-way.

Relationship

Built through sustained conversations with Channel Partners that also ensure that both sides are always on the same page when it comes to business objectives and expectations.

Goal Setting

Realistic goal setting that avoids the traditional pitfalls of business partner activities - that of overpromising and under delivering.

Engagement at multiple levels

Ensuring that both your campaigns and personnel engage with Channel Partners at all levels – from strategy planning to hyphenate execution of partner events.

Email Marketing

Email is among the most ubiquitous forms of communication, and despite the hype about social media, it remains one of the most effective marketing tools in our wired world. For instance, as recently as 2012, the US Marketing Channel and Engagement Benchmark Survey found 63% of respondents cited that commercial email marketing generated a higher ROI than any other marketing channel. But, in an age of spam and information overload, how do you harness the power of email for Enterprise Marketing? our experience shows that enterprise email marketing campaigns often fail because they treat customers as a group and not individuals.

Or put too much emphasis on technology at the cost of the communication itself. Or fail to answer questions like how we can induce repeat purchases. While we count an array of impressive email marketing software and email marketing tools among our technical capabilities, we are clear that the real credit for the repeated successes of our email marketing services must finally rest with the power of communication. In other words, the power of a compelling story.

Business Partner Motivation

At Gauge, we believe that your Business Partners are not passive receivers of your B2B communication, but active partners in an ongoing conversation based on shared objectives and mutual advantage. Such a relationship cannot be built overnight, and requires careful and extended engagements with BPs, starting with clarifying your own business values and discovering, and finding out the extent to which your BP is aligned with them.

Such an exercise also allows you to weigh your differences, so as to determine to what extent you can live with them, all of which is the base from which effective B2B marketing campaigns and B2B campaigns can be built on. Which is why the Gauge approach to Business Partner communication has never been uni-directional, but designed on the lines of a conversation – the only real method to build - and sustain – any long term relationship.

Social Media

Dazzled by the spectacular rise of social media marketing and the opportunities it offers, for some time now, the marketing world has abounded in claims that it is the future of marketing – the equivalent of a gold mining boomtown which no self-respecting prospector can afford to miss. Social media management is in a state of flux and has moved beyond acquiring Facebook fans with occasional engagement and vanity metrics. It is about creating a social story and taking actionable insights from it to create a stronger brand. For instance, studies show that fewer and fewer users click on Facebook ads anymore (they routinely average a .1% click-through rate), or the fact that a staggering 1.2 million active Facebook users disappeared from the site in the month of December 2012 alone.

In other words, the social media landscape is currently undergoing a fragmentation as users turn away from traditional spaces like Facebook and retreat into newer, lesser known spaces that are able to serve their needs better. That’s why at Gauge, we recommend that social media campaigns need to be “influencers” rather than “advocates”, that loyalty in social media must be earned through extended engagement with users, than be bought. In other words, the social media world might be nothing like what we are used to, but the rules of People Engagement remain the same.

Digital

A key challenge facing Enterprise marketers today is ensuring synergy between offline and digital media for B2B communication. One reason for this common disconnect is the unfortunate fact that offline content often relies on the tried-and-tested methods of traditional advertising, and is often created by people with little familiarity of digital media, whereas digital communication tends to more youthful and constantly changing in response to changing technologies and market conditions.

At Gauge, we have taken care from the start to avoid falling into this trap while devising our digital marketing campaigns. By seamlessly integrating both people and processes from the two worlds, we have over time developed the cohesive yet flexible approach that Enterprise Marketing demands.

Mobile

If mobile marketing is being hailed as the future of marketing – indeed, of media, the internet, shopping and just about all else – it is not without reason. Mobile usage is rising across the world, and more significantly, smartphones are overtaking feature phones in most developed countries, and today accounts for over 50% of all phones in countries like US. The explosion of mobile apps, tablets and portable devices further testify to the trend, and it has been clearly established that mobile marketing campaigns deliver a ROI that is simply not achievable by other marketing methods. And yet, the fact is that few Enterprise Marketers have woken up to the true import of this revolutionary medium.

For instance, only 2% of US advertisers’ media spend goes into mobile, even when it has been found that mobile accounts for 23% - nearly a quarter - of total time spent online. At Gauge, we have always been quick on our feet when it comes to tapping into the latest in mobile marketing strategies and techniques – be it social media-connected mobile marketing campaigns, pre-click engagement or contextual advertising. But while we recognize the need to stay on top of a constantly evolving B2B mobile marketing landscape, our experience has repeatedly demonstrated that when it comes to content and People Engagement, the basics of communication remain the same, irrespective of the medium.